Greek myth and war, read in clay and stone.
Recorded lectures on ancient Greece that range from Homer's Achilles to painted pottery, the sanctuaries at Olympia and Delphi, and the buildings of the Athenian Acropolis. The delivery is loose and chatty, with temple ornaments called 'jazzy' and treasury offerings called 'bling'. Underneath the jokes, the lectures show how art carried stories of myth and war.
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Ancient Greece: Myth, Art, War is made from recorded lectures, and the recordings keep the feel of a class in progress. Slides get pointed at and earlier sessions get recalled. Students are told they will feel the incised lines on real pots in tutorials. The range runs from Homer to the Acropolis. A lecture on Achilles is careful about sources, noting that popular stories such as the dip in the river Styx come from sources much later than Homer. It sets him apart from an earlier generation of roaming heroes (Heracles, Jason, Bellerophon and, further back, Perseus) and calls him the great warrior of Western literature. Pottery gets close attention. It is described as the largest single category of evidence from the ancient world. The lectures explain how black figure and red figure differ, down to incision: details like a painted Poseidon's eyes and beard are cut through the slip so the clay shows beneath. Everyday scenes on vases are handled with caution, since they can be idealised, simplified or bent to fit a small curved surface. Small asides keep the material grounded, like prize vases whose oil winners apparently sold for cash, or an image of a baby in what is thought to be a potty chair, matched to a surviving example. Myth on pots gets its own session, built around Trojan War images. One painter, singled out as a literate show-off who writes all over his work, shows Achilles killing the Amazon queen Penthesilea at the instant he falls in love with her. The lecture also admits that some painted myths cannot be identified at all. Architecture and sculpture take up the larger objects. The Doric and Ionic orders are laid out, with Doric the plainer and more austere. Corinthian is treated as a showier variation on Ionic that only becomes an order in its own right under the Romans. The sanctuary of Zeus at Olympia appears as a venue for every kind of competition, where a temple was paid for with the spoils of war and treasuries stored offerings for states to show off. Marathon brings war and art together most directly. It is framed as an Athenian win against the odds, with Plataean help, over the Persians, though not the battle that decided the Persian Wars, which Salamis and Plataea did more to settle. Athens, the lecture notes, never let the rest of Greece forget it. The Parthenon anchors 'The Acropolis Programme', which looks at its pediments through drawings made before the 1687 explosion and through battered fragments the British Museum acquired from Lord Elgin, among them three headless women interpreted as Hestia, Dione and Aphrodite. The voice stays plain-spoken and a little irreverent throughout, which keeps a dense subject approachable.
Made for: Suits a listener who wants the Trojan War, Marathon and the Parthenon explained through the objects that survive, and who is comfortable with the structure and asides of a recorded class.
What sets it apart: Rather than simply retelling myths, these lectures read painted pots, temple sculpture and sanctuary monuments as evidence, showing how Greek states used art to broadcast victories and rivalries.
In this subject students are introduced to the diversity of the ancient Greek achievement, which has exercised a fundamental and continuing influence upon later European literature and culture. The subject commences with a detailed treatment of Homer's Iliad and the myth of the Trojan war. This is one of the dominant myths in the Greek tradition and is narrated in some detail in epic poetry, in drama, and in art and architecture. We explore how myths are 'read' in their historical context, especially in the contexts of the Persian and Peloponnesian wars of the 5th Century BC. A variety of sources are treated to enable students to build up a picture of Greek society as a whole.
Achilles falls for Penthesilea as he kills her; that painted vase will complicate your museum visit.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A focused account of how Athens rebuilt the Acropolis and how damage and removal shaped what remains.
The Acropolis Programme frames Athens' best-known ancient monument as a story of rebuilding, rivalry, and cultural memory. It places the Parthenon and the wider sanctuary of Athena within the major fifth-century BC renewal, while reaching back to the Persian sack, the evacuation…
A close reading of how Greek vases make the Trojan War feel shifting, visual, and alive.
The Trojan War comes through here less as a settled tale than as a set of choices, arguments, and recognitions. The episode moves cleanly from shifting mythic traditions in the evidence to the decisions preserved on vases, then narrows in on Achilles and Penthesilea, Menelaus…
A clear, grounded look at Athenian vase painting as both technical craft and limited social evidence.
Vase Painting in Classical Athens treats ancient pottery as more than attractive illustration, giving it weight as one of the ancient world's richest surviving bodies of evidence.
A measured look at how Greek sanctuaries turned military victory into artistic and political memory.
War comes into focus through what Greek sanctuaries kept after battle. At Olympia, a surviving metal griffin from a shield leads into the larger story of weapons and armor as offerings, while the temple of Zeus and a Spartan victory monument show how sacred ground could hold…
Olympia becomes a focused guide to Greek worship, architectural form, artistic display, and civic prestige.
This single-episode review frames Greek sanctuaries as places where worship, architecture, sculpture, and civic ambition all press into the same ground.
Greek myth told with fatal momentum.
Ancient empire told in old public-domain voices.
The Parthenon cost 469 talents, and one drachma was about a day's wage for an ancient Greek worker.
Ancient Greece: Myth, Art, War centers this lecture on the sanctuary of Zeus at Olympia, alongside Hera, treasuries, and the Olympic Games.
Ancient Greece: Myth, Art, War turns to vase painting in Classical Athens, treating pottery as the largest surviving category of evidence and focusing on 6th- and 5th-century BC Athenian black figure and red figure.
Exequius's black-figure vase of Achilles and Ajax shows the heroes named on the pot, bent over a board game with scores of 4 and 3.
Ancient Greece: Myth, Art, War focuses on Olympia, Delphi, and Athens, with Olympia's armour dedications and the Battle of Marathon as the main examples.
Nearly 500 productions of Euripides’ Trojan Women were recorded between 1902 and 2002, and the lecturer connects its anti-war themes to Athens’ slaughter and enslavement of Melos in 416 BCE.
Euripides' Iphigenia in Aulis, in this lecture, is read as a play about decision making, with Agamemnon sending a second letter to cancel the first and changing his mind three times.
The lecture places Lysistrata in February 411 BCE, after the Sicilian disaster cost Athens about 30,000 men and most of its navy, and roughly four months before the democracy was overthrown.
The lecture on Sophocles' Ajax (about 440 BCE) argues that the play uses a myth from the end of the Trojan War to ask what skills and what kind of human being a changing society needs.
Thucydides' account of the Sicilian expedition ends with Athenian ships chained into Syracuse's Great Harbour and at least 7,000 prisoners held in quarries on half a pint of water a day.
Thucydides' admission that he made speakers say what "was called for by each situation" shapes how this lecture treats his account of the war between Athens and Sparta from 431 to 404 BC.
A lecture on the Trojan War narrative in Homer's Iliad, exploring its role as the quintessential Greek myth.
A university lecture analyzing the character of Achilles in Homer's Iliad and his role as a warrior in Greek mythology.
An introductory lecture on ancient Greek civilization focusing on Homer's Iliad and the myth of the Trojan war.